Nothing
by ashe678
Summary: After viewing CCTV footage of a weevil acting strangely, Torchwood investigate. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

A word, a flash of light, then nothing.

Dusk was encroaching on the town's sunlight as the hunched figure ran up the alley with an odd limp and a small bundle cradled in its arms. Because of the dimming light, one could only see the navy boiler suit it wore. If anyone was passing along that stretch of road and happened to glance up the alley, they would assume it was male, from the unidentifiable features of the back of a head and the boiler's suit. If they happened to venture further up the mouth of the rather dark alley, they would be in for a surprise.

Upon closer inspection, the afore-assumed male figure would prove to be distinctly not human in origin. This lack of looks did not particularly affect the creature, although she, because the creature was in fact a girl, generally avoided densely populated areas and going out of the sewers before five in the evening.

Once she reached the end of the alley, the bundle was carefully placed to the side of a medium-sized circular metal lid. The lid was removed, the bundle tucked securely back in its arms and the figure disappeared down the drain hole.

Once the circular covering was safely back in place, the creature started up a high-pitched keening noise. Her back slid down the damp wall, curiously in almost an exact replica of humans when they have reached high levels of grief or shock. The bundle was shaken, softly, before becoming more violent, leading up to the hurling of the ragged bundle at the opposite wall.

The impact against the wall separated the rag from the majority of the clump, revealing for the first time a shockingly white, wrinkled newborn creature. The neck was slit and crimson blood was still oozing from the wound. Upon seeing the exposed body, the female creature, probably the dead infant's mother, started shrieking louder, its cries bordering on the human hearing range.

Leaning back from the monitor, Tosh shakily drew a breath, "My God…," she seemed to snap out of the shock and regain full composure in the same moment because she quickly turned on her coms, voice iron hard and commanding, "Jack, get down here now."

Her voice never rose above a soft snap but Jack heard the tone of her voice and knew it instantly. It was the tone of those pushed close to the edge. Alarmed, he almost leapt down the stairs to get to Toshiko's work station. There, he was greeted by a sight on the monitors that while different, was no less horrifying.

The creature was dipping her finger into the blood that was still exuding from her child's neck. She was moving her finger over to the wall and writing on it. In English. Something wasn't right. Weevils didn't write in English. They were primitive and just a bit stupid and _didn't write_. They needed to get there.

Almost simultaneously, the hub burst into action. Tosh moved to grab her portable tablet computer while Jack made to grab his coat while yelling. Everyone else realised what was happening and within the next ten seconds, everyone was sliding into the car. Almost immediately, the car was starting and then, suddenly, they were moving at an alarming rate through the streets of Cardiff.

Tosh had managed to hack back into the CCTV by the time they hit the outskirts of Splott. It wasn't until they were at the dead-end alley of System Street that the CCTV cut out.

The sewers were dark, dank and smelly, as she wrote on the wall, 2 + 2 = 4, in big letters. She had read a small book someone must have thrown down the drain, not a day before she'd found it, otherwise she'd never have been able to make it out. The masters were coming, she knew that. They were different than the masters from the book, though. They wouldn't give her a second chance. Her baby was her warning. It didn't matter if her like ended, as long as she got the message out. She scrawled faster and faster, before one word, spoken from a master behind her, stopped her where she stood.

The word was repeated, a flash of light followed, and then there was nothing.

Tosh frantically tried everything she could, alternative cameras, rebooting the link, but nothing gave her the same view inside the sewer. Jack was feeling anxious about entering the hell-hole with no knowledge of what lay inside. So, naturally he went first.

Inside the sewer was dark wet and slimy, with a horrid smell that made Jack want to puke. More importantly, there was nothing. The infant weevil that should have been over to his right was no-where. The writing on the wall the he himself had read was no-where. The mother weevil, the rag, everything was gone. Even the high-pitched keening that was ever-present on the CCTV was replaced with a heavy, oppressing silence.

"Have you found the body yet?" Owen's snarky voice cut through the silence like shattering glass, masking the barely audible mechanical whir as it started up and faded into the distance.

Jack took a few seconds to respond, "Nah, there's nothing here, no baby, no weevil, no blood, no writing, no nothing. I say we come back tomorrow and check it out." Everyone was confused with Jack's reaction, and to be truthful, so was he. Why was he telling everyone to get out, go away when there was nothing there? Something in the back of his mind kept telling him he was right, and as it got stronger, he felt the need to reinforce himself, "That's an order!" was added almost as a very afterwards after-thought.

Jack pulled himself out, shut the lid, and continued to be distant like he was every time something big was happening and he was troubled. Thoroughly disgruntled, the team reached the hub, and without saying a word left for their respective homes.

What they didn't realise was in the sewers below them, below the hub, the words were repeated five times, five flashes of light followed, and nothingness filled the five voids where life had once been.

**A/N: Wow, I didn't think when I started writing it that this would be the final result. If you would like this to become more than a one-shot, please just review saying something along the lines of "I would like to know what happens next," or something like that. I would continue writing the story anyway, but I'm a lazy bugger and would probably get three words done and then never look at it again. If I know, however, that someone actually wants to read a next chapter, I will end up writing a next chapter.**


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: This chapter's style is somewhat different to the last and probably has some kind of Australian humor in it. It's okay if you don't get it. I'm not sure why this is a different style, but I went on a camp the day after I posted the last chapter and came back yesterday. That probably has something to do with it. School starts tomorrow so the wait between chapters might be a bit spread out. I'm sorry. Alternatively, this chapter could be called "How To Kill A Dalek."**

Tosh was woken by the sound of a tinny, no, not tinny, but electronically distorted voice. It was funny how the half-asleep mind could pick up details like that without ever wondering why she was being woken up by an electronically altered voice.

A few moments later, when she had properly woken up, she wondered, and the conclusions she came to in moments were not good. Having scrambled for the lamp that resided on her bedside table, she accidentally knocked it off, though the light still worked.

Standing, or sitting or whatever the hell it was doing in front of her was a dalek.

Similarly, Ianto wondered why a metallic voice was waking him up but unlike Tosh, he didn't realise it was electronically altered. Like Tosh, he knocked his lamp off his bedside table too, though he got lost in his train of thought about tungsten removers and whether the bleach he used in the hub would be suitable to clean the mess the metal alien had surely left on his carpet. Wait - he thought, - alien. With that, he swore.

Owen woke up in a foul mood, already swearing because of the headache his hangover caused him. He didn't realise what had woken him up until he stubbed his toe, cursed some more, and looked up. He swore even more.

Gwen woke up primarily to a frantic husband, secondarily to a strange alien. Like Owen, she cussed rapidly.

On the other hand, when Jack woke up to a dalek standing over his bed, he acted on instinct and rolled over, grabbing his gun from the bedside table, and, not bothering to turn on the light, nailed it in the eyestalk. Before attempting to flirt with it. After all, it's only the live daleks that want to commit mass genocide.

Not altogether thankfully, the members of Torchwood only slept naked if there was someone with them, and seeing as four out of five of them were alone that night, the various daleks were not confronted with seeing skin out of the shell. Except the one who turned up at Gwen's house. He died of shock after seeing Rhys running round with nothing on.

The three remaining teammates whose daleks unfortunately did not die, were shepherded half-asleep out into the cold pre-dawn Welsh air, where they promptly woke up. Despite daleks not having cars, they were remarkably good at traveling unnoticed, something that was probably helped by the fact that they floated down the closest sewer hole in proximity to their respective flats.

Gwen, having a husband on the verge of having a panic attack and an unidentifiable foreign object in her flat, naturally, called Jack. Jack, having nearly been attacked by an easily identified dalek in his bedroom, naturally, tried to call Ianto. With Jack unavailable, Gwen was on the verge of having a panic attack, though she still had the smart idea of taking the unidentifiable foreign object's head-piece off. On sight of the dead dalek-in-flesh, she immediately had a panic attack. With that, the Cooper-Williams household dissolved into anarchy.

While being ushered along the dark, dank sewers in nothing but her pajamas by a mysterious alien with obviously malicious intent, Tosh figured that the machine shoving her forward was the only type of intelligent life she'd see for a while, so she started telling it about the works of Alan Turing.

Which turned out to be quite helpful, seeing as unbeknownst to the dalek or her, Davros used Turing's work as the basis for the dalek's computation system, as everyone from Earth does for every computing system. The dalek, recognising the basis of its computers coming from the mouth of a human, fell into a deep contemplation of what the dalek morales stood for if humans invented the basis for their systems and were thus superior. It became catatonic and Tosh just walked away.

Stumbling drunkenly alongside the moving metal monstrosity, Owen had the good fortune to accidentally breathe into its face. Unfortunately for the dalek, its air filters were running at full bore, trying to purify the stinking, stale sewer air into pure oxygen. The sudden burst of alcoholic carbon dioxide released almost directly into the air filters overwhelmed them completely, and they broke with a bang and a spark. The dalek took one last shuddering, contaminant-filled breath before it died.

Owen was too hungover to notice, and stumbled into a weevil colony.

Ianto was being hustled along in only his boxers and a t-shirt, and as he was not hungover, he felt the cold acutely. He wrapped his arms around himself and drew breaths in short shuddering gasps.

Ianto used his rather intelligent brain and thought. After around five minutes of thinking, which was all he could really afford, - who knew how close he was to a weevil colony or wherever the alien was taking him - he had a plan. It was a pretty atrocious plan and probably wouldn't work and he'd likely just get suckered along by the alien thing again, but it was the only one he had.

After a couple more steps, he pushed it over and ran.

He had never been good with direction unless he had a compass or a map. Seeing as he had neither of those things, Ianto was horrible with direction and utterly lost. Still, he staggered around the tunnels, hoping to stumble upon an exit.

At home, on his bedside table, his mobile phone rang.


	3. Chapter 3

It is almost universally agreed that walking around the streets of Cardiff in your pyjamas, especially the middle of the night, is silly. The only exception to this agreement was the cat lady, who had upward of forty cats. The various members of torchwood knew it was silly, but come three in the morning and they were all walking around in their pyjamas, shivering.

The only member of the elite government organisation who wasn't wandering the streets of Cardiff in the early hours of a new day was Jack, who was about to go berserk because not one of his team was answering their phones or coms and it was highly probable that there was more than one dalek prowling the streets.

Somehow, each lower-ranking member of torchwood seemed to gravitate towards the hub, with the belief it was impenetrable. Gwen drove her car, her rather large husband sitting beside her and complaining.

Owen stumbled along, drunk, hungover and swearing. Weevil colonies were rather hard to stagger into, and out of unscathed. Generally, Weevils are not nocturnal and prefer to sleep in their colonies. Despite those facts one could only tell it was a Weevil colony by the type of excrement scattered around, several Torchwood boiler suits and a small crying weevil infant, abandoned in one corner. Abandoned like the rest of the colony.

It could not be known wether he was consciously making the decision to head to the hub, or wether instinct was pulling him there.

Tosh was sneaking through the streets, or, well, trying to. She was very aware of her lack of proper attire and her cheeks flamed red in the cool night air.

Ianto was also feeling his lack of clothing acutely, though he was better at going unnoticed through the night-time streets of Cardiff. He imagined people staring at him with every step he took, and turned his mind to picturing the lovely black emergency suit he kept in his locker at all times.

Gwen made it to the hub just in time to stop Jack from literally exploding with tension and worry, though he did start yelling as soon as the door rolled away.

"Where the hell were you? Why weren't you picking up your phone, or the coms?," he changed his tone from anger to worry almost immediately, evidence of the emotions raging inside him, "Do you know where the others are? Have you heard from any of them? Have you heard from Ianto?"

Gwen happened to be quite a bit slower than Jack, and while yes, she had found an alien in her house that was going to kill them until Rhys flashed it, it didn't yet occur to her that the others might have found an alien in their apartments too. The amount of time it took for her to piece things was a bit shameful, especially with Jack yelling at her about the others.

By the time she realised, Tosh was halfway through the door and she was halfway through a sentence. "The was this alien thing that broke into our apartment but -," she was cut off by the cog door's alarms alerting them to Tosh's presence.

She came in shivering with the cold because while she was wearing perfectly modest, warm winter pyjamas, pyjamas are made to be worn inside, under a doona in a heated room. Hearing the silence in the room and taking that as a cue to start talking, Tosh started to recount her story to the three listeners awaiting her tale.

Owen, however, was subconsciously lost. Subconsciously lost in the fact that he wasn't consciously aware that he was actually going anywhere but his instincts couldn't lead him to where he instinctively wanted to go.

Ianto was crossing the Plass, the least covered, dark-alleys and corners part of his whole journey. And while he tried to stay as unnoticeable as possible, several drunks foiled his plan. When they shouted "Oi, mate!" across the square, Ianto thought he was done for it and prepared himself for insults that would almost certainly be flung his way. He was cowering from the blow that never came. Too drunk to realise that he was in pyjamas and was most certainly not their friend they'd seen stagger off a while ago, they invited him over for another beer.

Too nervous about drawing attention to himself to refuse, Ianto walked over, instantly became best mates with each of them, was handed a full bottle of beer and took a sip, one sip, before he quietly slipped out of the drunken group, unnoticed and not missed.

Owen stumbled through some of the darker alleys, clutching his head and quietly groaning, unnoticed and not missed by some other late night revellers whose party he accidentally stumbled through. Unlike Ianto, he expected nothing and got something, being called a fag and several other undesirable names as he passed through their presence.

Ianto was relieved when the cog door alarms sounded. Owen was not and instead groaned, clutching his head, and stumbled into the metal grille that was on the right side of the door, despite entering at the same time as Ianto, thanks to his drunken not-really-friends.

Jack was greatly relieved when Ianto and Owen walked and stumbled through to the hub. He would have been more concerned about Owen's lack of equilibrium if he hadn't known that he was suffering from one of the strongest hangovers imaginable. Tosh was still cold when the pair walked through the door, and so was Ianto. Owen was in considerable pain, Gwen somewhat bewildered and Rhys was silently insulting them in his head; he'd always believed them to be below his Gwen.

The dalek hiding away in the same room Lisa once inhabited felt that it was all too easy as he triggered a lockdown.


	4. Chapter 4

The alarms flashed at the same time that Jack, with his advanced fifty-first-century instincts, felt danger. Or, well, they flashed a bit afterwards. Because once the alarms went off, everyone had the this-isn't good-what-the-hell's-happening feeling in their gut.

With the strobing yellow lights, Torchwood leapt into action. Tosh lunged for her computer, Owen ran for his, the alarms providing a sobering effect, Ianto ran to check and secure the archives at the same time Jack did, Gwen raced for her computer and Rhys stood still on the spot, looking around, confused.

Through all the din and mayhem that was now the once-peaceful hub, Tosh managed to shout over the noise, "Internal lockdown, triggered in the basement by … me?"

Confusion laced the last word of her sentence and, almost automatically, the din and mayhem stopped and everyone, including Rhys, who had gone to follow his wife, gathered around Tosh's computer, everyone peering over her shoulder trying to read her screen.

"Someone's hacked into my account," she began quietly and uncertainly; she hacked into banks, she knew how to protect her account, "Pulling up log records, I logged out at eight last night before someone hacked in at ten. They've been in my account for five hours, whoever they are, they could've been through most of the systems by now." Fear marked her voice.

Jack, having a rather good idea of who 'they' were, swore and ordered Toshiko to do a scan of the basement and lower levels for any lifeforms or heat signatures. He feared what they would find.

"Scans detect one life-form in the lower basement, where Lisa was, sorry Ianto, and," the monitor started beeping, "More than one hundred in subbasement level ten. The numbers are increasing, one-fifty, one-fifty-five."

"What's in subbasement level ten, Ianto?" Jack asked, frantically. If there was something there, Ianto would know.

"Nothing, not even lights, just," his voice trailed off, realisation dawning on his face.

"What's down there Ianto?" Jack's voice grew forceful.

"Sewers," suddenly the rest of the team got it. Tosh however, in the mere moment that the rest of them spent getting it, got it, examined it, found a hole in it, realised it wasn't a hole and explained why it wasn't a hole almost straight away.

"Then the life-form in the lower basement is controlling the weevils. Two plus two equals four," she breathed, "Whatever is in that basement is a genius."

Tosh was pulled into the here and now with a message popping up and writing scrawling across the screen, "It's set up an electrical forcefield around the lower basement. Draining some power but not enough to become unsustainable. Until it decides to take the field down, we can't get in."

"Can't you just cut off the power to the lower basement or rewrite the power source or something?" Jack's voice was desperate.

"I'm trying," she snapped, "But the being's just too fast. For every line I type, it's typed nearly a thousand. I have a feeling that this thing could calculate a trillion combinations in one second flat."

With comment, Jack went pretty much wild. "Did any of you, ANY of you see a big metal object that moved around and talked and looked like this?" He pulled up a large hologram of a dalek from his wrist watch.

Gwen frowned, "We woke up to one. Then Rhys got all shirty with it and when he got out of bed it just sort of … died. I took the head off and the thing inside was dead too."

Jack swore. "Owen did you see one before you came here?"

"Of course I saw one! I'm 'ere in my pyjamas! You don't think I came here in the middle of the night in my bloody p.j's for nothing did you?"

"Owen," a warning.

"Alright, alright. There was one o' them things and it woke me up, shoved me out of bed and pushed me along through the sewers a bit. Then it just stopped an' I came across an empty weevil nest before I went out and made it to the hub."

"Tosh? Ianto?"

"One woke me up and pushed me out of bed and into the sewers, same as Owen. Then I started talking to it about Alan Turing - he created the binary system - and after a while its computer started whirring, it was thinking harder, and then it stood still and didn't remove or respond. I then came here."

"It was all the same but I pushed mine over, and then started running here."

Jack swore. Again. "So we've got a dalek in the lower basement wreaking havoc, and each of us saw one before we got here. So that's, what, at least six daleks running around Cardiff. Plus who knows how many others that we haven't encountered yet."

"Probably none," everyone turned to look at Tosh incredulously, "I mean, you know that pod we found three months ago? There were six irregular hexagonal indents on the floor that match up with the bottom of these dalek's outer shells. Also, the controls were built for a creature with circular concave hands."

"In english?" Owen snarked.

"The dimensions and features of the pod we found ages ago matches up with these daleks."

"So what do they want?" Jack asked suddenly.

"How should I know?" Tosh asked, a bit annoyed. She could do a lot of things but she wasn't wonder woman or psychic. "There's no way I can tell what they want."

The screen beeped again. "But I can," Ianto cut in suddenly, "I think they want their ship back."

**A/N: Two chapters in two days. You're lucky. Thank-you to everyone who's reviewed. Just one more chapter to go, and then the end.**


	5. Chapter 5

He pointed to the screen where two life-forms, bright red under the heat scan were moving towards a certain part of the archives, "That's where I put the pod after we declared it non-functional."

"Then why are they getting it if it's not functional?"

Ianto glared at Owen, mainly for being thick, "It could be that they don't know it doesn't work or its security systems might be the reason we can't get it to work."

Owen, being not big on social hints, decided to ask another stupid question, "What about the other daleks? Does it know they're dead?"

This time, Jack answered, a little more kindly than Ianto did, "No, it knows they're dead. Internal com links."

"So what do we do now? Just let it go?" Gwen was asking the questions now.

"Pretty much, yeah. We don't have the weapons or resources to fight them."

"But we did alright at fighting them. Why don't we just broadcast the wikipedia page on Alan Turing en masse?"

"Because daleks are geniuses. They do things like re-routing a power supply from the most technologically secure place in Britain, possibly the world, to make a force field that can last indefinitely. They do what they want. We, basically, can't stop them. Only the doctor can. That's why we let them do what they want. Because we can't stop them if they want to do something. If we were to do down there, right now, and try and get past that force field, and hey, let's say we do get past that force field, we'd be exterminated on the spot. We'd die, straight away and the dalek wouldn't bat an eyelid. It wouldn't care. That is why we don't go after them."

After that speech, everyone had the fight sucked out of them. They drew up chairs and basically collapsed on them, still wearing the pyjamas they wore to bad the night before and watched the little red dots on the screen move the transport pod along until it reached the room the dalek was in. They watched the force field go down. They did nothing. They saw the fainter red dot move into the craft and they saw it disappear in the blink of an eye.

They heard the weevil's cries of confusion as they were released from the mind control they were subjected to. They saw the red dots flood out of subbasement level ten and saw that the lockdown had been lifted. They went home and back to bed.

Far beneath them, an abandoned infant's cries were silenced as its mother rushed back to the colony where it had so hastily abandoned it after being subjected to mind control. The infant's mother wept, howling as the baby uttered its final cry.

**A/N: The end. I had fun with it and I hope all those who read/are/were reading it liked it too. Here is the disclaimer because I just realised I didn't put one in. Torchwood Institute is property of the BBC. Also property of the BBC are all the named characters and all the monsters. Alan Turing is not property of the BBC. Most things in this story, apart from the plot, are.**


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